The Ecstatic Pan

Phil Powrie

Through ecstasy, emotion reaches its climax, and thereby at the same time its

negation (its oblivion). Ecstasy means being “outside oneself,” as indicated by the

etymology of the Greek word: the act of leaving one’s position (stasis). To be

“outside oneself” does not mean outside the present moment, like a dreamer escaping

into the past or the future. Just the opposite: ecstasy is the absolute identity with the

present instant, total forgetting of past and future. If we obliterate the future and the

past, the present moment stands in empty space, outside life and its chronology,

outside time and independent of it (this is why it can be likened to eternity, which too

is the negation of time).

Milan Kundera1

There is no such thing as a straightforward image in Truffaut’s work. Underneath an

apparently neutral image the meaning of which appears obvious, there always

emerges a second image more violent, deeper than the first which it eventually

replaces and surreptitiously subverts.

Carole Le Berre2

We are thirteen minutes from the end of Les 400 Coups (1959), in the Centre

d’Observation de Mineurs Délinquants. Antoine and a new friend are talking about

what brought them there. Antoine’s new friend expresses surprise that Antoine stole a

typewriter, because it would have been traceable, unlike the tires stolen by the boy

across the park to whom he points. We cut to this boy, who is talking about his father

to another boy, as they sit on a bench beneath a stone statue: “Me, every time I cried

at home, my father would imitate my crying with his violin, just to annoy me. But one

day I got fed up, I had a fit and, bang! I slugged him” (1:21:50).3 During this speech

the boy strokes the buttocks of the statue’s female figure. As he says “bang!” the

camera pans up from him to the figure of a child, held aloft by the female figure, and

his companion says, “You did the right thing. I’d have killed my old man if he’d done

that to me.”

This fourteen-second exchange is only tenuously linked to the narrative. We

never see this boy again. And yet the shot includes a highly visible camera movement

that draws attention to itself by its unmotivated nature. Why does the camera suddenly

pan up, away from the two boys, to an angelic-looking child? What exactly is the

pan’s function? What might it be encouraging the spectator to think or feel? Is it part

of a pattern in Truffaut’s cinema, and if so is it merely a mannerism, or is it a

functional trope? I shall claim that it is the latter, and that it has a specific function. In

so doing, I am attempting to correct the view that Truffaut’s work is technically

unsophisticated.

That view was to some extent encouraged by Truffaut himself, who said that

his objective was to film beauty without appearing to do so (“sans en avoir l’air”), or

to do so nonchalantly (“en ayant l’air de rien”).4 For that reason no doubt

commentators, particularly in the last twenty-five years, have tended not to enter into

sustained discussion of his camerawork. Two earlier commentators, Jean Collet and

Elizabeth Bonnafons, both talk about Truffaut’s “aerial” camera, particularly in his

early films. Bonnafons also establishes a useful framework more generally when she

posits that Truffaut’s cinema is caught between two polarities: the “definitive,” or the

“ideal,” on the one hand, and the “provisional,” or “reality,” on the other, although

2

she does not link this structure systematically to Truffaut’s camerawork.5 Collet talks

of the opening crane shot of La Nuit américaine (1973), positing a correlation

between the camera movement and an aesthetic jouissance of a clearly sexual nature.6

Nestor Almendros, director of photography (DP) for nine of Truffaut’s films, puts it

well in a memorial issue of Cinématographe when he says that a typical figure in

Truffaut’s work is the “the lyrical and amorous moment when the camera takes off.”7

I will investigate these moments, looking closely at both the upward pan and

the upward crane shot, bringing together the insights of Collet and Bonnafons so as to

define the nature of that “taking-off.” It is true that the upward shot is less frequently

used by Truffaut than the relatively ubiquitous horizontal tracking shot, which is often

combined with a horizontal pan, and which I will also consider. But when the upward

shot occurs, it is generally an emphatic shot that draws attention to itself in ways that

are quite the opposite of “en ayant l’air de rien.” It is often associated with specific

objects: a woman’s legs, an art object (a painting, a photograph, a book, an

instrument), or a place like a movie theater. It is often also accompanied by epiphanic

music that signals a revelation. Hence the title of this chapter: the upward shot in

Truffaut’s cinema is a moment of ecstasy, a momentary flight towards some

ambiguous ideal combining the erotic, the violent, and the artistic. As my epigraph

from Milan Kundera suggests, ecstasy is an intensely present moment that is in some

respects “outside” time and space. I will claim that these moments in Truffaut’s films,

whether punctual and flagrantly intense, or more subdued and diffuse, are held in

tension with the horizontal tracking/pan shot. The upward pan is a key figure in

Truffaut’s aesthetic.

I. The Case of the Missing Camera (Movement)

3

In a letter to an unknown screenwriter, Truffaut writes that “I never know

where I’m going to place the camera one hour before I begin shooting,”8 underlining

the prejudice that his approach to the camera is cavalier. In his introduction to

Almendros’s autobiography, Truffaut similarly downplays his interest in camerawork:

“How [does the DP] interpret the desires of a director who knows exactly what he

wants but can’t explain what he does want?”9 Although this offhand attitude is very

much part of the New Wave’s mythmaking, which minimized studied technique and

emphasized the improvisational and the spontaneous,10 neither of these statements is

likely to be true, given the length and complexity of so many tracking shots in

Truffaut’s films, often combining lateral and upward pans. We might think, for

example, of the opening and closing sequences of Les 400 Coups, or the opening

sequence of La Nuit américaine, or the opening sequences of Vivement dimanche!

(1983). And then there are the extended horizontal tracking shots within the body of

many of the films, such as Mathilde’s walk into the woods before collapsing in La

Femme d’à côté (1981), or some of the cemetery scenes in La Chambre verte (1978).

Many of these have been commented on at length, particularly the closing sequence of

Les 400 Coups and the opening sequence of La Nuit américaine.11

The absence of sustained attention to the camera is even odder when we

consider that one of the nostrums of the New Wave is its energy and vibrancy, partly

achieved through the use of a very mobile camera. An early volume on Truffaut

mentions the camera frequently, but this is subsumed within a general point about

innovation, exuberance, and vitality; in La Mariée était en noir (1968), for example,

“the camera seems to flow and glide in patterns of never-ending harmony. . . . The

effect is almost literally one of a dance.”12 Don Allen has a number of comments on

Truffaut’s camera for some of the earlier films—he talks about the use of zooms at

4

the start of Fahrenheit 451 (1966),13 or the pans and tracks at the start of L’Enfant

sauvage (1970)14—but there is no sustained analysis, and the comments on camera

technique peter out after Les Deux Anglaises et le continent (1971), as if attention to

the camera is somehow more appropriate for the period corresponding to the New

Wave than for Truffaut’s cinema as a whole.

True, Truffaut does not talk much about the camera, even in his private letters.

The letters nonetheless contain some fascinating if contradictory passages on the

value of tracking shots. These are in letters to the director Bernard Dubois concerning

a film that Les Films du Carrosse was producing, Les Lolos de Lola (1976). Truffaut

questions Dubois’s predilection for long tracking shots, saying that they make him

wonder how Dubois will bring those scenes to an end;15 it is almost as if the long

tracking shot generates an unstoppable and therefore problematic momentum of its

own. And yet in a letter written the very next day, he advises Dubois to employ the

long tracking shot, because, he claims, it can “build up the tension” and “keep the

audience on their toes.”16 Commentators have not noticed even these sparse

indications of Truffaut’s concern. Hervé Dalmais, in a long section on Truffaut’s

techniques, discusses scriptwriting, adaptation from novels, dialogue, sound and

music, the use of color, editing, and décor; he has nothing on camerawork.17 The

substantial Dictionnaire Truffaut, published twenty years after Truffaut’s death,

seems the ideal place to address a wide range of issues relating to the technical

aspects of filmmaking; it nonetheless downplays the camera. Jérôme Larcher’s entry

on the use of the iris shot points out how “the form of Truffaut’s films is rarely talked

about” because he “often uses a handful of stylistic procedures.”18 It is a position also

taken by Vincent Amiel in the same volume. His entry on Truffaut’s use of black-and-

white stock shifts attention away from formal techniques to narrative: “The least that

5

can be said is that Truffaut’s sensitivity to form is less marked than his interest in

dramatic or narrative techniques. Visual elements in his films are dealt with simply,

not indifferently, but without any particular sophistication.”19 When there is a focus

on the camera in broader terms, or on the DP, it is on lighting and color. Michel

Marie’s entry on Raoul Coutard dwells on his use of light;20 Coutard himself, in the

extended scene-by-scene commentary for the DVD version of Tirez sur le pianiste

(1960), does not mention camera movement at all, his focus being on the use of a

heavy camera, lighting, and print development.

Amiel’s entry concerning the other major DP associated with Truffaut, Nestor

Almendros, focuses on “the harmony of light and color that tends to close off space”

in the films.21 Almendros himself, as we have already seen, is sensitive to much more

than light and color. He points out that “Though people think a cinematographer has

to take care of lighting first and foremost, I believe the frame is just as important.”22

He stresses the way in which Truffaut engages with an actor’s movements to create a

continuous fluidity, echoing Petrie’s comments on the “dancing” camera: “Truffaut…

tends to follow the actors’ movements at medium distance with dolly shots….

Truffaut also likes to use the plan-séquence, choreographing the movements of actors

and camera, so as to minimize editing.”23

It is hardly surprising that the tracking shot has been the focus of the relatively

few comments on Truffaut’s camerawork, given Jean-Luc Godard’s famous

declaration in a roundtable organized by the Cahiers du Cinéma around Alain

Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959) that “tracking shots are a question of

morality.”24 This is a provocative restatement of Luc Moullet’s “morality is a question

of travelling shots.”25 Both statements were repeated by Jacques Rivette two years

later in the journal.26

6

This focus on tracking shots obscures the importance of upward shots in

Truffaut’s aesthetic. The tracking shot grounds the character, while the upward shot is

a metaphorical flight, violently ecstatic, as Carol Le Berre suggested in passing in her

1993 study of Truffaut.27 Indeed it is all the more violent and ecstatic because of its

close relationship with the tracking shot. Where the tracking shot compresses and

restricts, the upward shot uplifts and transports. The tracking shot deflates; the upward

shot elates.28 The tracking shot anchors desire to the stickiness of the body; the

upward shot causes the body to disintegrate in vertiginous desire.

II. Methodological Issues

What exactly constitutes an upward pan, and how might it differ from a simple

reframing of an object or of a character in movement? The majority of the upward

pans in the films are the latter. A character in medium close-up stands; the camera is

close enough that it must pan up to keep the character in the frame. A phone rings; the

camera follows the character’s hand as it stretches down to pick up the phone, and

pans back up to the character’s face. The character climbs stairs in medium or

medium long shot; the camera follows. Nothing might seem more natural than these

reframings, although they beg a question: why is the camera so close to the character

that it has to pan up or down? Why not have a static camera in medium shot? The

majority of such “natural” reframings, precisely because they are so “natural,” in all

probability do not strike us as significant. They might do so, however, if there seemed

to be a large number of them, or if a pattern emerged whereby they tended to be

associated with specific objects; for example, women’s legs or items linked to

creativity (photos, books, letters, etc). It is for these reasons that I will consider these.

7

Kundera writes that “the acoustical image of ecstasy is the cry.”29 If the

reframings I have discussed might be likened to “statements” in normal speech, the

“cry,” or the “exclamation,” comes from those moments where there is a bigger and

less obviously motivated upward movement. In these instances, the camera is not so

much following a movement originating from a character, as it is creating a

movement-in-itself, a movement designed to attract attention to itself. These are not

just moments of elation; they are self-conscious moments of excess. As we shall see,

upward shots are heavily gendered: “statements” are male, “exclamations” are female;

“statements” are about desire, “exclamations” are about jouissance and death;

“statements” are timidly attempted ecstasies, “exclamations” are epiphanic ecstasies.

Given that such feelings accompany camerawork, to what extent is the upward

shot a marker that we might wish to associate with Truffaut, rather than his DPs? This

question is particularly acute when we remember that during the New Wave, the DP

“became the primary partner, adviser and second-in-command to the director” and

that “accomplished cinematographers are likely to be auteurs themselves.”30 Coutard

was Truffaut’s DP for five films during the 1960s;31 Almendros was his DP during the

next decade or so for nine films.32 There were other DPs, of course, including Pierre-

William Glenn for three films,33 and Denys Clerval for two.34 Given Truffaut’s

relative indifference to technique, it would not be unreasonable to assume that it is not

just the color palette that changes with the DP—something noted by the contributors

to Le Dictionnaire Truffaut—but also the camera movement. A significant shift in the

use of a movement such as the upward pan—its absence, or its insistence, or a very

different use in specific contexts—might suggest that it is less a marker of Truffaut’s

aesthetic than of his DPs.

8

Table 1 provides a breakdown of upward pans or cranes in the twenty-three

principal films. The table calculates the ratio of upward pans relative to the length of

each film; in other words, in the case of the first film, Les Mistons (1957), there is one

upward pan for every 2.8 minutes of the film. While this kind of data analysis is

clearly a blunt instrument, since it normalizes a procedure that does not necessarily

occur at regular intervals during the film, such purely quantitative data nevertheless

encourages a look at technique across Truffaut’s career.

Date

of

film

DP Upward

pans

Film

length

(minutes)

Ratio

1 Les Mistons 1957 Malige 6 17 2.8

2 Les 400 Coups 1959 Decae 41 95 2.3

3 Tirez sur le pianiste 1960 Coutard 17 78 4.6

4 Jules et Jim 1962 Coutard 39 101 2.6

5 Antoine et Colette 1962 Coutard 9 29 3.2

6 La Peau douce 1964 Coutard 28 113 4

7 Fahrenheit 451 1966 Roeg 34 107 3.1

8 La Mariée était en noir 1968 Coutard 12 103 8.6

9 Baisers volés 1968 Clerval 16 87 5.4

10 La Sirène du Mississippi 1969 Clerval 38 117 3

11 L'Enfant sauvage 1970 Almendros 27 84 3.1

12 Domicile conjugal 1970 Almendros 41 93 2.3

13 Les Deux Anglaises et le

continent

1971 Almendros 31 124 4

14 Une Belle Fille comme 1972 Glenn 27 94 3.5

9

moi

15 La Nuit américaine 1973 Glenn 41 112 2.7

16 L'Histoire d'Adèle H. 1975 Almendros 27 96 3.6

17 L’Argent de poche 1976 Glenn 36 101 2.8

18 L'Homme qui aimait les

femmes

1977 Almendros 35 114 3.3

19 La Chambre verte 1978 Almendros 25 90 3.6

20 L'Amour en fuite 1979 Almendros 24 91 3.8

21 Le Dernier Métro 1980 Almendros 41 126 3

22 La Femme d'à côté 1981 Lubtchansk

y

31 101 3.3

23 Vivement dimanche! 1983 Almendros 33 106 3.2

average 3.6

Table 1. Upward pans/cranes in Truffaut’s films.

With the exception of three films, the ratio ranges between one upward pan for

every 2.3 to 4 minutes, right across Truffaut’s career. However, three films have

considerably fewer upward pans (although this may make those few occurrences all

the more interesting). All three are in the pre-1968 period; after 1968, no film has a

ratio of less than one per 4 minutes. The average ratio rises after 1968. It is possible to

claim that the change may be connected to the DP, given that the ratio for the films

with Coutard in the 1960s is 4.6, and those with Almendros in the 1970s and 1980s is

3.3. However, the difference corresponds reasonably closely to the pre- and post-1968

data overall, suggesting that Truffaut’s inclinations had changed regardless of the DP.

10

III. Stairs: “Women’s Legs Are Compasses”

A focus on women’s legs is one of the systematic motifs of Truffaut’s cinema,

more often than not associated with an upward pan, rather than a static camera. This,

at least, comes very much from Truffaut and not his DPs. As Bertrand Morane said in

L’Homme qui aimait les femmes (1977), “Women’s legs are compasses that measure

out the globe, bringing balance and harmony.”35 This phrase also serves as an entry in

Le Dictionnaire Truffaut, in which Armand Guigue points out how Truffaut uses

stairs as a means of showcasing women’s legs.36 This is particularly the case in

L’Homme qui aimait les femmes, in which the camera pans up the legs of three

women as they climb stairs: the woman in the factory early on in the film (0:5:50),

Delphine in the restaurant (0:47:54), and Geneviève as she runs up the stairs

(1:49:52). Charlie in Tirez sur le pianiste similarly gazes at Léna’s legs as she climbs

some stairs (0:29:0).

Indeed, Truffaut ensures that the link between women’s legs and stairs, with

the associated upward pan, are foregrounded in the dialogue on a number of

occasions. As Charlie follows Léna up the stairs, his voiceover says, “Don’t look at

her legs, it’s bad form.” “Look at your mother’s beautiful legs,” says Antoine’s

stepfather, Julien, to him in Les 400 Coups, as the family climb back up to their flat

after a night at the cinema (0:50:0); and in Le Dernier Métro (1980), Lucas says to his

wife Marion as they climb the stairs back up to the theater, “You think I make you go

first out of politeness? Not at all. It’s to look at your legs” (0:27:55).

Domicile conjugal (1970) focuses obsessively at times on Christine’s legs.

The opening scene of the film has a series of left-right-left horizontal pans of her legs

over two shots as she walks outside, ending with an upward pan. This is immediately

followed by a staircase scene with a shot of her legs as she climbs; it is from the point

11

of view of the old concierge, who stares lecherously up her skirt. We return to her legs

in a standard staircase scene a few minutes later (introduced by a slight upward pan),

as she and Antoine climb out of the cellar where they have gone to get a bottle of

wine (0:8:38). As they later climb the stairs to their flat, he pretends to be a monster,

who, he tells her, comes at night “to grab hold of women’s legs” (0:13:19). Later in

the film, attention is drawn to her legs by an upward pan from the concierge’s point of

view, as he makes a considerably cruder comment than Julien or Lucas, after she has

collected her baby from the child-minder: “I wouldn’t be able to screw that sweet

thing particularly well, but I’d certainly love to” (0:46:24). After Christine’s

separation from Antoine, she is “replaced” by a number of prostitutes in the brothel he

visits, who come down and then go back up the stairs (1:23:24), again with upward

pans, as is the case with all of these examples. The return to normal married life is

signaled at the end of the film when Christine rushes down the stairs, left behind by

Antoine; even though she is going downstairs, the camera still pans up slightly

(1:32:11).

Pans up women’s legs, but without stairs, occur on many occasions. Clarisse

in Tirez sur le pianiste (0:17:0); Julie in La Mariée était en noir (1:18:0); Liliane in

L’Amour en fuite (1979) (0:42:15; 1:18:50)—although these are in fact outtakes from

La Nuit américaine, released six years before; Marion in Le Dernier Métro, as she lies

in bed with her husband (1:03:00). In his last film, Vivement dimanche!, Truffaut pans

lovingly up Barbara’s legs when she is dressed as a prostitute (1:19:25), and a second

time a few minutes later as she perches on a chair to spy on Louison (1:23:12).

Such upward pans could amount to mannerism. However, Truffaut seems well

aware of this, and is quite capable of poking fun at himself. Recall Bertrand Morane’s

statement that women’s legs represent “balance and harmony.” In Vivement

12

dimanche!, Barbara leaves Julien in the basement of his office. He stares not so much

disconsolately as expectantly up at the window, which is at street level. She realizes

that this is so that he can stare at women’s legs as they pass by, and she shakes her

head with a wry smile (1:13:33), although on coming out onto the street she walks

back and forth in front of the same window so that he can see her legs.

The emphasis on women’s legs in close association with staircases suggests

that we might explore in more detail what would otherwise seem a “natural” use of

the upward pan. Many upward pans in Truffaut’s films function merely to emphasize

a change of location as a character moves from a ground floor to another, higher floor.

But there are also enough of these instances associated with the desire to be with a

woman to suggest a pattern. The clearest examples are all of Jean-Pierre Léaud

climbing towards a woman, most often in the Antoine Doinel films. We have already

seen how this happens repeatedly in Domicile conjugal, where the emphasis is on

Christine’s legs; we also saw how substitutes for Christine in the form of the

prostitutes were associated with staircases and upward pans. In the same film

Antoine’s courting of Kyoko is emphasized by repeated shots of him climbing up to

her flat (0:59:40; 1:01:30; 1:04:23). When he starts to tire of her, we see him

repeatedly and comically climbing the stairs to a telephone booth in the restaurant

where they are dining, so as to talk to his estranged wife (1:28:27; 1:29:40). The

return to the “conjugal home” of the title, is, as we have seen, also effected by a

staircase scene at the end of the film.

This pattern is a constant in the Doinel films. In Les 400 Coups the woman

desired is Antoine’s mother, shown in the key staircase scene mentioned above. In the

next film of the series, the short Antoine et Colette (1962), we see Antoine climbing

stairs to Colette’s flat towards the beginning and the end of the film (0:14:0; 0:25:45),

13

and in between we see him moving to a new flat opposite Colette’s, emphasized by a

rapid upward swish pan on the outside of the block of flats (0:19:20). In Baisers volés

(1968), when released from military prison at the start of the film, Antoine’s first

thought is to visit a prostitute. We see him climbing the stairs, accompanied by both a

prostitute and an upward pan (0:06:20); when he decides that she is not the one for

him, he meets another in the same hotel and climbs back up, with an upward pan that

takes in her legs (0:07:46). As his affair with Fabienne develops, we see him climbing

up the stairs to his flat to discover a present and a letter from her, which makes clear

that she would like to have an affair with him (1:07:49). After he rejects her, she visits

him in his flat so as to sleep with him. The scene is introduced by another ostentatious

procedure favored by Truffaut, and which we have already seen in Antoine et Colette:

the rapid upward swish pan from the street up to a high-level flat.37 This time,

however, it is not the desired woman’s flat but Antoine’s, suggesting her control over

the situation. When Antoine finally gets his girl, Christine, this is signaled by a series

of three tracking shots with a handheld camera, the second of which pans up the stairs

to Christine’s bedroom, where we eventually discover the lovers sleeping (1:21:50).

Although the pattern of upward pans linked with stairs and a desired woman is

more prevalent in the Doinel films, we also find it in Les Deux Anglaises et le

continent, another film starring Léaud. The relationship Claude has with the two

sisters is punctuated by staircase scenes with upward pans, signaling Claude’s desire.

Mrs. Brown climbs the stairs followed by her daughters and by Claude after the game

of charades, when Claude stops outside his bedroom, flanked by the two sisters

(0:17:27). The staircase scenes subsequently chronicle his attempts to get close to

each sister in turn. When he and Muriel climb the stairs, he touches her, to her

surprise (0:28:20). He later climbs the stairs to Ann’s artist’s studio after they have

14

become lovers (1:19:04); not long afterwards he climbs the stairs again when he

realizes that he may be losing her to Diurka (1:22:45). After Ann’s death, he finally

sleeps with Muriel, who has remained a virgin, but only after they climb the stairs in a

Calais hotel (1:52:46). It is in that hotel scene that Muriel says to Claude that he is not

the marrying kind, something that is true of all of Léaud’s characters in his Truffaut

films. Climbing stairs and the associated upward pan forms a trope signaling desire

for the “definitive” woman, to use Truffaut’s terminology; but it is a desire doomed to

fail, as the urge for the ideal is overtaken by the “provisional.” The drive towards

Kundera’s ecstatic moment beyond time is submerged by the return to reality and the

everyday.

IV. The Work of Art: “I Have the Religion of Love”

Another truism of Truffaut’s films is that, according to Holmes and Ingram,

each displays “a fascination with virtually anything connected to the process of

artistic creation.”38 They then explore in particular how Truffaut’s characters write

books and letters.39 Many of these references involve upward pans. The camera is

placed close to characters writing, obliging a reframing onto their face. A medium

distance rather than a medium-close or close-up would not have required a reframing

with an upward pan. What does the pan add to the shot? We might argue, irrespective

of whether it is intentional or not, that it establishes a subliminal link between the

object (the book, the letter) and the immediacy of the character’s body, the better to

suggest the act of creation as desire, either for the other or for one’s self-development.

In the former case, we find such pans when Jean-Pierre Léaud as Antoine tries

to write a letter to Fabienne Tabard in Baisers volés (1:08:46). The same actor plays

Claude in Les Deux Anglaises et le continent, and he writes to Muriel that he loves

15

her, the camera lifting pointedly, almost ironically, to a painting of a seated man

reading with a child by his side, and two women. It thus reflects Claude’s situation in

relation to the sisters, and his desire (expressed in voiceover as he writes) to marry

Muriel and have a family (0:35:40). In the same film, Muriel writes Claude to win

him back (0:56:44), echoing the earlier shot, reinforced by the fact that both shots use

voiceover and both are accompanied by Georges Delerue’s romantic strings. In

L'Histoire d'Adèle H., a film dominated by the shadow of a great writer, Victor Hugo,

we see Adèle, Hugo’s daughter, frequently writing. On one occasion she is writing her

journal, when an upward pan accompanies the voiceover: “I have the religion of love”

(0:30:54); indeed, we later see her kneeling and praying before a makeshift altar that

enshrines her lover’s photograph.

In the case of characters who write for themselves rather than for those they

desire, there is still a strong component of desire for a woman. In Une Belle Fille

comme moi (1972), the sociologist Stanislas Prévine uses a tape recorder to collect

material from Camille (played by Bernadette Lafont, star of Les Mistons) for his

thesis on deviant women; he will increasingly fall for her charms. There is an upward

pan from the recorder to Prévine early in the film (0:16:13), echoed by a similar shot

from the recorder to Camille as she tells him about her love life (0:32:16). In similar

vein, we see Bertrand in L’Homme qui aimait les femmes standing on a stool in front

of a wardrobe to reach for his typewriter as he decides that he will record his loves in

a novel (0:26:18). The shot is echoed later when the young Bertrand stands on a stool

in front of a wardrobe and finds photos and lists of his mother’s lovers (0:42:59);

Bertrand draws a direct comparison between what his mother did and what he is

doing.

16

The most ideal form of writing in Truffaut’s films is the work that Jean Itard,

played by François Truffaut, engages in with Victor in L’Enfant sauvage. One key

sequence of upward pan shots focuses on language learning: panning up from the

wooden letters Itard uses to teach Victor the alphabet (0:55:54; 1:00:58), Victor

picking them up from the floor where he has thrown them in frustration (1:01:38),

Itard reframed as he stands and enters a battle of wills with Victor (1:06:14), and a

final pan as Itard writes his journal, celebrating Victor’s “first spark of the

imagination,” as he calls it (1:10:31).

These examples of upward panning associated with writing do not comprise a

form of mannerism, even as they are repeated, unlike the shots of stairs and women’s

legs we examined. Nor are they simply a stock technique, which might recommend

that when a character writes, the camera should focus on the writing and then pan up

to the character’s face. Rather, I believe they form part of a pattern that associates the

act of writing with desire.

A variant of this procedure can be found in Tirez sur le pianiste, where

sustained repetition of upward pans is used to explore issues of identity, with at its

center a painted image, rather than writing. Half an hour into the film there is a

complex flashback sequence where Léna reconstructs Charlie’s past. The sequence is

punctuated by the same kind of upward pan shots we found in L’Enfant sauvage.

There, the focus was the acquisition of language, with Victor increasingly affirming

his subjectivity and identity. Here, it is also about identity, in this case the

reconstruction of Charlie’s identity as Edouard Saroyan, the concert pianist. Until this

point Charlie’s past has been a mystery. In this sequence, we see him courting

Thérèse; climbing stairs to the offices of Lars Schmeel, the music agent (a first

upward pan, 0:32:03); his rise to fame as a concert pianist; Schmeel’s advice to him

17

that he should try to cure his timidity (a point underscored by Schmeel standing up

with an upward pan reframe, 0:36:59); Schmeel will soon lift a large portrait of

Edouard, accompanied by an upward pan reframe, as he says that having the portrait

means that Edouard cannot escape him (0:38:00). This sequence rebuilds the lost

identity of Charlie as Edouard the concert pianist. Following Thérèse’s suicide, he has

taken the job of pianist in a bar, in a scene introduced by an upward pan from the

piano keys to the hammers and a comment by Léna who asks pointedly: “Who is

Charlie Kohler?” (0:44:28). A few minutes later, we return to the present; Léna tells

him that she will “wake” him, and that he will become once more Edouard Saroyan,

the concert pianist, the point underlined by an upward pan which takes in both Léna

and the poster of Edouard the concert pianist that Charlie keeps in his room (0:48:43).

But Edouard is not who he seems to be. At the end of the film, we understand

that he is rather more like his violent brothers than he originally thought. When his

gangster brothers learn from him that he has killed a man, Chico proudly claims that

Edouard is like them (1:09:45), that the four brothers are all the same, his point

emphasized by an abrupt upward pan reframing him as he stands up (1:10:42).

Importantly, the struggle for identity consistently involves death. Edouard’s

rise to fame as a concert pianist leads to Thérèse’s suicide when she throws herself

out of the window. Léna’s attempt to reconstruct Charlie’s identity as Edouard, to

rebuild that same career as a concert pianist, to take him from the low life she

despises back to the high life of fame and fortune, leads to her death at the hands of

the gangsters, as she tumbles down the snow slope in the penultimate scene of the

film. Like Sisyphus, the small and timid Edouard and his women struggle up

figuratively towards success and self-confidence, their ascent marked by upward pans,

only to fall, the women literally as well as figuratively, Charlie only figuratively.

18

Thérèse’s defenestration is emphasized by Charlie’s point-of-view shot looking down

from the balcony with a rapid downward pan (0:43:30), and Léna’s slide down the

snow-slope is accompanied by a slow downward pan, also Charlie’s point of view

(1:15:12). Edouard in the concert-hall tumbles figuratively to become Charlie in the

backstreet café; he exchanges arpeggios and a bow tie for a riff and a drooping

cigarette.

The sequence of upward pans therefore suggests the fragility of

Edouard/Charlie’s identity, as is confirmed by the discussion between the brothers at

the end of the film. It is hardly surprising that two of the pans in the sequence I have

analyzed involve images of Edouard, as Schmeel and Léna respectively talk about

who he is. If we had to isolate a single iconic image in this sequence, it would be,

precisely, the painted image of Edouard. Both Schmeel and Léna think that they can

“capture” Edouard/Charlie; but he remains a “mystery” which is what Léna calls him

in answer to her own question: “Who is Charlie Kohler?”

So far, I have attended to repeated patterns of what might otherwise have

seemed to be unremarkable reframings, or “statements” as I label them. Truffaut’s

repeated upward pans map specific emotions and urges onto the characters: sexual

desire, self-expression, self-affirmation. All three connect with the urge for the ideal

—the ideal woman, the ideal identity—articulated through the work of creation. My

exploration of Tirez sur le pianiste suggests that the urge for the ideal can lead to

failure, and is intimately bound up with violence. This configuration is considerably

more in evidence in those punctual upward shots that function as “exclamations”

rather than the “statements.”

V. Ecstasy: “Films Are More Harmonious Than Life”

19

Writing may be important, as is suggested by Fahrenheit 451 with its human

books, or by Doinel and Morane as writers of novels, but Truffaut reserves a special

place for the cinema in his films. Holmes and Ingram point out that, with the

exception of his historical films, one usually finds in Truffaut “some self-referential

tribute to the pleasure of watching and/or making films.”40 In Les 400 Coups, for

example, we see Antoine and René skipping lessons and going to the cinema; the

camera lifts up from street level to the sign “CINE” (in bold uppercase) as if to

express the cinema’s literal ascendance (0:20:15), even eclipsing the film being

shown, in spite of its lurid poster.41 The opening shot of Antoine et Colette is a

familiar pan up from the street to the cinema on the Place de Clichy (0:1:41), before

moving to Antoine’s flat.42 The most obvious expression of cinema’s importance in

Truffaut’s work, however, is La Nuit américaine. Although it contains many

examples of relatively unobtrusive upward pans, or “statements,” the film stands out

for its “exclamations,” ostentatious crane shots incorporating pans. The best example

of this comes about halfway through the film, and halfway through the shooting of the

film-within-the-film. As Holmes and Ingram describe it,

Ferrand concludes a voice-over monologue on the complexities of the

director’s role with the words “le cinéma règne” (“cinema reigns”), which

trigger the opening bars of an exuberantly triumphant musical score and a

series of rapid cuts between shots showing aspects of the filmmaking process,

concluding with a crane-mounted camera soaring into the sky to the music’s

crescendo.43

In fact this is a double crane shot; we see the crane panning up while the image we see

on screen is also the result of an upward pan. Holmes and Ingram draw out the

implications of the shot: “Film is unequivocally celebrated as a medium that both

20

represents and transcends the real,”44 quoting a statement Ferrand makes later in the

film, that “films are more harmonious than life” (1:22:58). Unsurprisingly, we find

similar crane shots in L’Enfant sauvage when Victor escapes from his captors at the

beginning of the film (0:10:24), and later from the constraints of the house and his

education (1:15:44). The “first spark of the imagination” brought about by education

was associated with relatively unobtrusive upward pans. Victor’s escape from nurture

back to nature is the occasion for expansive shots accompanied by the same kind of

baroque music used in La Nuit américaine’s expansive upward cranes.45

As I suggested at the outset, the combination of expansive crane shots and

music creates epiphanic moments. The film that has the greatest number of these—all

are sweeping helicopter shots—is Jules et Jim (1962). None of them are associated

with Jules; they are all associated with Jim and Catherine, who will both die at the end

of the film when Catherine drives the car over the broken arch of a bridge. This link

with death is important; indeed, the first of these epiphanic helicopter shots occurs

when Jim visits the war cemetery (0:35:21). The rest are connected to his relationship

with Catherine, initially figuring his desire for her. When he visits Catherine after the

war, the voiceover explains that it is as if she had finally arrived at the missed

rendezvous in the Paris café years before; meanwhile the camera pans up and away

from the station to a view far out over the pine forests, accompanied by Delerue’s

lushly romantic strings (0:36:23). On another occasion, they have spent the night

together, after a month-long courtship. The camera sweeps away from Catherine’s

face, panning laterally to a copy of Goethe’s Elective Affinities, and takes off up

towards the window focusing once again on distant trees, as the voiceover says that

“other women did not exist” for Jim (1:02:57).

21

Three further helicopter shots occur at the next stage of their relationship,

when they desire a child. We see Jim leave for Paris on the train, the camera lifting

away as the train leaves, with the voiceover saying that Jim and Catherine wanted to

get married and have children (1:08:16). Jim returns to the chalet some weeks later,

and they spend the night together. The camera again takes off in a helicopter shot over

the trees, accompanied by swelling strings, as the voiceover says, “Once again they

soared high like great birds of prey. They had to remain chaste until Catherine was

sure that she wasn’t pregnant by Albert. This restraint exalted them. They stayed

together all the time; they didn’t cheat on each other. The Promised Land was in

sight” (1:16:26). A final instance introduces a new technical element:

superimposition. Jim and Catherine have separated again, as she seems not to be able

to become pregnant. Jim receives a letter from her in which she tells him that she is

pregnant. A helicopter shot soars across the treetops, with Catherine’s face

superimposed, as she voices what she has written:

I love you, Jim. There are many things we don’t understand, and many

incredible things that are true. I’m pregnant at last. We must thank God. Bow

to him, Jim. I’m sure, absolutely sure that you’re the father. Please believe me.

Your love is part of me. You live in me. Believe me Jim, believe me. This

paper is your skin, the ink is my blood. I am pressing hard so that it can sink

through. Answer me quickly. (1:25:59)

The same type of shot occurs six years later in La Mariée était en noir, also

starring Jeanne Moreau. She has just pushed Bliss—one of the men responsible for

the murder of her husband—to his death from the balcony of his high-rise flat. The

white chiffon scarf she used to lure him to his death floats away in the wind high

above Cannes, to the accompaniment of a Vivaldi mandolin concerto (0:16:02).

22

The cranes or helicopters used to achieve these shots literally transport the

spectator into a mobile space. That space is one of exaltation, as the narrator of Jules

et Jim comments. The etymology of “exaltation” confirms the “lifting up” out of the

ordinary (Latin’s exaltare, meaning to lift up).46 These shots are ecstatic, in the sense

commonly accepted, and used by Kundera in the epigraph to this chapter; they take us

out of stasis so that we are “outside ourselves,” in a privileged moment of absolute

presentness, “outside time and independent of it.”47 And as Kundera also notes,

ecstasy is associated with climactic emotion. Indeed such shots are climactic,

expressing a desire for the ideal, for harmony. This is true, even if that harmony is

born out of revenge in the case of La Mariée était en noir; as Dominique Auzel

writes, “the flight of the white scarf in the clear sky is an ethereal vision of revenge,

as if an evil genius had floated weightlessly out of a lantern and were materializing

the act.” 48 Everything about these shots emphasizes the desire for harmony as a

reordering of the everyday: they soar into the sky, flying above the mundane and the

problematic; they are accompanied by music that either expresses the romantic ideal

of transcendence and fusion, or, in the case of baroque or pseudo-baroque music, the

notion of an almost mathematical order.

VI. The Agony and the Ecstasy

When discussing Jules et Jim’s discrete technique, Holmes and Ingram point

out how the end of the affair between Jim and Catherine, when she pulls a gun on

him, jars with the rest of the film because it is “high melodrama.”49 I would argue that

the “ecstatic pans” identified above are equally melodramatic, both by virtue of their

quality (helicopter shots, once with superimposition) and of the “exalted” language

spoken over them. In this section, I reflect on the implications of the melodramatic

23

mode used in combination with the upward pan, as part of a complex network of

mobile shots.

We could argue that the melodramatic nature of these upward pans expresses

Catherine’s nature, which, according to Jules, tends to the excessive. He says to Jim,

“Your love went from zero up to a hundred with Catherine’s. I never knew your zeros

or your hundreds” (1:38:21). But we have seen that the melodramatic, “ecstatic” pan

is not confined to Catherine; it touches Julie in La Mariée était en noir, played by the

same actress. Similarly the less ostentatious upward pans, closer to reframing, are

overwhelmingly associated with Léaud in his many roles in Truffaut’s films. We

could conclude that the upward shot is fundamentally gendered: flamboyant and aerial

for Moreau, discrete and more earthbound for Léaud.

This corresponds to Truffaut’s clearly gendered style, which Holmes and

Ingram characterize pithily as “small men/big women,”50one of the subheadings of the

chapter on sexual politics. Truffaut’s men are weak and timid, while his women are

powerful. The melodramatic nature of the truly ecstatic shot (via crane or helicopter),

as opposed to the reframing upward pan, works in complex ways, however. It may

well suggest the desire of a powerful woman; but its excessive nature functions to

undermine that power, to ironize it. In the key shot with Catherine’s superimposed

face, arguably the high point both of her feelings and of the helicopter shot, there is an

abrupt and ironic reversal. We had been flying forward and up across the trees, but are

arrested and taken backwards, as a superimposed statement in block capitals reads,

“The Promised Land jumped backwards” (1:16:45). With this gesture Truffaut takes

away with one hand what he gives with the other.51

24

Antoine Doinel is also treated with particular irony by Truffaut, as Holmes

and Ingram argue when demonstrating how the director’s misogyny is offset by irony

at the expense of some male characters:

The extent to which Antoine Doinel is treated ironically varies between the

films, but after Les 400 Coups the identification with his viewpoint on the

world is tempered to some degree by techniques which underline the partiality

of his vision and illuminate (albeit briefly) the opposing vision of the women

he encounters.52

But what is striking in Jules et Jim and La Mariée était en noir is the way in which

ecstatic shots are contrasted with the more ubiquitous tracking shot. This works to

ground Moreau’s characters, to bring them back to earth, and, ultimately, to reduce

the power that the ecstatic shot might otherwise have given them, and which irony

had already worked to undermine. Both men and women reach for the sky in

Truffaut’s films. But men do so timidly, hardly aiming higher than a bedroom; while

women reach melodramatically for an ideal. Both fail, and it is the tracking shot, often

combined with horizontal pans, that insists on that failure.

Tracking shots in Truffaut’s films occur more frequently than upward shots, as

common sense would suggest, since characters are more likely to walk than climb.

However, tracking shots require rails and the careful blocking of the action.

Almendros has commented on Truffaut’s predilection for sequence shots: “He tries

not to edit. If he can keep it all in one shot, he’s very happy,”53 leading to what

Almendros calls “choreographing the movement of actors and camera.”54 Hence

tracking shots are aesthetically motivated. Just as was the case with upward shots,

some of which are excessive and ostentatious, so too there are particularly long

tracking shots scattered throughout Truffaut’s films, which also draw attention to

25

themselves. Anne Gillain has shown how in Les 400 Coups they are positively

contrasted with static interior shots to suggest freedom from constraints.55 My

analysis, focusing on the system of mobile shots, leads me to a different conclusion.

In the case of Jules et Jim, the majority of these long tracks bear negative

connotations. After the three characters have been to the theater, a set of tracking

shots leads to Catherine throwing herself into the Seine (0:24:53). When Jim visits

Jules and Catherine in the chalet, he and Catherine explain their feelings in a set of

tracking shots, the first of which lasts almost two minutes (0:49:15); we could argue

that this event is positive, but we know where this relationship will lead. Towards the

end of the film, there are a number of long tracking shots: Jim leaves the chalet in an

atmosphere of discord (1:22:20); the two men leave Catherine with Albert for the

night in the Auberge La Bécasse (1:32:12), accompanied by the same music we hear

in the later combination of swish pans and tracks as Catherine drives herself and Jim

to their deaths (1:38:38). And, finally, there is the final long track as Jules walks

through the cemetery (1:40:57). The negative associations of so many tracks undoes

both the urge for the infinite expressed in the ecstatic pan, and also the rather more

joyous tracking shots for which the film is famous: the sprint on the bridge with a

handheld camera (0:13:25), and the two bicycle rides (0:21:45; 0:58:58).

A similar development occurs in La Mariée était en noir. After the ecstatic

shot following Julie’s murder of Bliss, each of the subsequent murders has a long

tracking shot incorporating horizontal pans, generally at the beginning of the

sequence. Julie accompanies Robert Coral as they walk away from the theater, the

long track ending with a slight upward pan on the statue of the nineteenth-century

naturalist Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in Etampes (0:24:28). Julie gains entrance

into the house of René Morane by following his son after school in an extended two-

26

minute track/pan that is clearly from her point of view (0:36:52). The sequence opens

in the car-lot belonging to Delvaux with a track. Similarly, Catherine explores the

gallery belonging to Fergus with a very mobile track/pan (1:10:09). Finally, she

allows herself to be caught at Fergus’s funeral so she can kill Delvaux in prison. The

funeral cortege is filmed as an extended track/pan (1:35:02).

A further pattern emerges from these two films. First, their function is to

ground the characters, to undermine the longing to rise above, the longing to engage

with the aerial ideal. Second, tracking shots are associated with violence and death, as

is clear in their finales, most emphatically in the last shot of Jules et Jim, which takes

place in a cemetery. The association of long tracking shots and cemeteries is equally

obvious in La Chambre verte. A minor upward pan occurs only once, as the camera

lifts up onto photographs of Julien Davenne’s wife in the green room, which functions

as a chapel to her memory (0:24:18). A similar sequence towards the end of the film

occurs as Davenne shows Cécilia the actual chapel he has refurbished in the cemetery.

The camera lingers once more on photographs of the dead, but this time all the camera

movements are tracks and horizontal pans (1:00:11). In between we find several long

track/pans in the cemetery, first of Davenne at night (0:46:97), and then a set of tracks

culminating in Davenne’s long walk with Cécilia (0:51:04). A further long track

accompanies the two of them talking about the chapel, the dead, and Julien’s eventual

death (1:10:05).

Long tracking shots are not just associated with death, but with loss more

generally. Recall the tracking shot in La Femme d’à côté, which occurs after Mathilde

is reminded of her affair by chance at her book-signing, and which is accompanied by

Delerue’s plangent cello (1:19:21). The same can happen to Truffaut’s male

characters. In Les Deux Anglaises et le continent, immediately after the sequence

27

when—with a strong upward pan—Claude climbs the stairs to Ann’s flat, comes a

sequence the next day in the garden with an extended track as she explains that she

has transferred her affections to Diurka (1:24:02).

Truffaut’s characters reach up for what he calls the “definitive,” his men

timidly, his women more urgently, if melodramatically. This urge for the ecstatic is

articulated technically by the upward shot. But ecstasy is always accompanied by

agony: for all the upward shots in his films, there are far more extended horizontal

tracking and panning shots, most of which occur in contexts of loss, violence and

death.

VII. Conclusion

Let us return to where we started. There are plenty of extended horizontal

track/pans in Les 400 Coups, most of them penning and constraining the children.

Even the final glorious track to the sea cannot hide the fact that Antoine will be

caught, which is one way of interpreting the ultimately ambiguous freeze-frame as

negative (en)closure. Antoine, being male, does not have the ostentatious upward

shots associated with Truffaut’s female characters. He, like so many of Truffaut’s

men, has to make do with the occasional reframing onto objects he yearns for: his

mother’s legs after a night out at the cinema, the cinema itself.

The statue shot discussed earlier is emblematic of Truffaut’s aesthetic. Like so

many upward pans in Truffaut’s films, it expresses desire for an ideal, the love

between mother and child, absent from his life. While not directly linked with

Antoine, this scene displaces both his desire and his anger onto an anonymous boy.

Antoine is both there (on the other side of the park), and not there (for we focus on the

exchange between two different boys). The statue shot is both part of his story, and

28

yet someone else’s, as if the sequence were saying, “My parents are not really like

that; I don’t feel the same rage.” Le Berre astutely summarizes this paradox: “The

spectator is both with the character, swept up in the spiral of passion, and standing

back, both caught in the drama and distanced from it.”56 My first conclusion,

therefore, is that, as Kundera puts it, the moment of ecstasy “stands in empty space,

outside life and its chronology, outside time and independent of it.”57 Such moments

are not hiatuses, or intervals; rather, they are interstices that articulate a beyond,

which is also anchored in the present. As Kundera says, “Ecstasy is the absolute

identity with the present instant.”58

Second, the ecstatic pan, as I have defined it, is both epiphanic and

cumulative. Some examples depend on repeated instances of unobtrusive reframing

(what I have called statements); others are ostentatious to the point of ironic excess,

cries of joy and of anguish at one and the same moment, which define a specific

aesthetic space, that of elation. Truffaut’s films are calibrations of speculative

ecstasies.

Third, the ecstatic pan is a moment of intense desire shot through with

violence and anger. Ecstasy is elusive, and once attained, ephemeral; this might well

explain the frequent appeals in Truffaut’s work for the “definitive.” Only violence and

anger, and ultimately death, the empty space of the eternal present, to recall Kundera,

can break through the ordinary to reach the ideal, as is amply demonstrated by Jeanne

Moreau’s characters.

Fourth, that violence and anger is gendered. Truffaut’s women are passionate,

his men diffident, more likely to accept the dilution of the definitive by the

provisional. But, crucially, his men would like to be passionate, would like to be

women. Truffaut cannot allow that to happen; it would mean dying, as so many of his

29

women do. No matter how much he may be attracted to the “definitive,” his films

work to contain the urge to dispense with the real that Truffaut believes is a

specifically female urge. This might well explain why so many of his films carry male

voiceovers, often by Truffaut himself, as if attempting to corset and harness the

enthusiasm of his women.

It also explains one of the more curious scenes in his films, the final sequence

of Baisers volés. Antoine and Christine are about to enter into a settled couple

relationship. The man who has been stalking Christine approaches them and declares

his love for Christine:

Before you, I’d never been in love. I hate the temporary [provisoire]. I know

all about life. I know that everyone betrays everybody. But you and I will be

different. We will be exemplary. We’ll never leave each other, not for a single

hour. I have no work, I have no obligations in life. You’ll be my sole

preoccupation. I understand . . . I realize that all this is too sudden, for you to

say yes at once, and that you must first break temporary ties with temporary

people. I am definitive. (1:25:18)

The ever-sensible Christine comments that the man is mad. Antoine comes across as

considerably less sure about this. Holmes and Ingram point out the paradox here:

“The commitment to an absolute, uncompromising form of love is attached to an

enigmatic, sinister and possibly crazy stranger—who nonetheless, both in his pursuit

of women . . . and in his romantically idealizing passion for a woman he scarcely

knows, strongly reminds us of Antoine.”59 The stranger’s statement that he will spend

every hour with Christine is repeated in La Chambre verte, where Davenne, played,

let us remember, by Truffaut himself, speaks approvingly of a couple who were

30

unable to spend time apart (1:02:13), suggesting that the desire for an intense couple

relationship may be mad, but is certainly worth thinking about.

Holmes and Ingram (and Le Berre) are right in concluding that there is a

tension in Truffaut’s work between “a yearning for the definitive, the permanent, the

absolute,” and “a preference both aesthetic and moral for all that is impermanent,

mobile, adaptable and provisional.”60 What my analysis shows is that attending to the

details of camera technique reveals a much deeper affinity with the definitive than

Holmes and Ingram suggest. Yes, there is tension between the definitive and the

provisional, the absolute and the quotidian, the extraordinary and the perfectly

ordinary. But the thirst for the definitive as expressed by upward shots, whether

discretely male or melodramatically and passionately female, structure Truffaut’s

films in consistent patterns. We should look at Truffaut’s films not as narratives with

a technique “qui n’a l’air de rien” (a nonchalant technique), but as an elaborately

choreographed dance between upwards and sideways cinematographic gestures, “qui

a l’air de l’air” (which looks like the aerial), a dance that expresses both the joy of

desire and its continual evanescence.

As my second epigraph claims, “There is no such thing as a straightforward

image in Truffaut’s work.” 61 Le Berre is referring to mise-en-scène. I hope to have

shown how camerawork is equally significant and complex in Truffaut’s films.

Truffaut’s cinematographic technique cannot be ignored.62

31

1 Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed, trans. Linda Asher (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), p. 85.

2 Carol Le Berre, François Truffaut (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1993), p. 193; trans. Diana Holmes

and Robert Ingram, François Truffaut (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 58 n22.

3 The DVD versions of the films used for this chapter are as follows: MK2 box-set (2009)

containing twelve films, in chronological order: Les Mistons, Les 400 Coups, Tirez sur le pianiste,

Jules et Jim, Antoine et Colette, La Peau douce, Fahrenheit 451, Baisers volés, Domicile conjugal,

Les Deux Anglaises et le continent, L'Amour en fuite, Le Dernier Métro, La Femme d'à côté,

Vivement dimanche!; MGM box-set (2009) containing seven films, in chronological order: La

Mariée était en noir, La Sirène du Mississippi, L’Enfant sauvage, L’Histoire d'Adèle H., L’Argent

de poche, L’Homme qui aimait les femmes, La Chambre verte; Une Belle Fille comme moi, 2

Entertain (2007; CCD30504); La Nuit américaine, Warner (2008; D5/Z791779).

Timings correspond to the beginning of the event analyzed, not necessarily to the beginning of the

whole scene.

4 François Truffaut, “Entretien avec François Truffaut,” Cahiers du Cinéma, 239 (1967), p. 70.

5 Elizabeth Bonnafons, François Truffaut: La Figure inachevée (Lausanne: L’Age d’homme, 1981),

p. 105. The terms are used by characters in Truffaut’s films (Baisers volés, La Sirène du

Mississippi); see Holmes and Ingram, François Truffaut, pp. 174-175, who use the opposition

between these two terms to structure an analysis of Truffaut’s aesthetic (pp. 173-203).

6 Jean Collet, Le Cinéma de François Truffaut (Paris: P. Lherminier, 1977), p. 233.

7 Nestor Almendros, “ Nestor Almendros,” Cinématographe, 105 (1984), p. 38.

8 François Truffaut, Letters, trans. Gilbert Adair (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), p. 144.

9 Nestor Almendros, A Man with a Camera, trans. Rachel Belash (London: Faber and Faber, 1984),

p. viii.

10 See for example Michel Marie, The French New Wave: An Artistic School, trans. Richard Neupert

(Malden, MA.: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 86-87. Jean-Luc Godard, reviewing Les 400 Coups in Arts,

wrote that the director should “accord more importance to what is in front of the camera than to the

camera itself;” quoted in René Prédal, Le Cinéma francais depuis 1945 (Paris: Nathan, 1991), p.

152. As Prédal points out, this is an “aggressive rejection of technique” (p. 152) in favor of “neutral

recording” (p. 153).

11 For the latter, see Collet, Cinéma de François Truffaut, p. 233, and Annette Insdorf, François

Truffaut (Boston: Twayne, 1978), p. 97.

12 Graham Petrie, The Cinema of François Truffaut (New York: Barnes/London: Zwemmer, 1970),

p. 33.

13 Don Allen, Finally Truffaut (New York: Viking Press, 1974), p. 117.

14 Allen, Finally Truffaut, p. 143.

15 Truffaut to Bernard Dubois, in Truffaut, Letters, p. 409.

16 Truffaut to Dubois, in Truffaut, Letters, p. 414.

17 Hervé Dalmais, Truffaut (Paris: Rivages, 1987), pp. 48-69.

18 Antoine de Baecque and Arnaud Guigue (eds.), Le Dictionnaire Truffaut (Paris: Editions de La

Martinière, 2004), pp. 166-167.

19 de Baecque and Guigue (eds.), Le Dictionnaire Truffaut, p. 283.

20 de Baecque and Guigue (eds.), Le Dictionnaire Truffaut, pp. 111-112.

21 de Baecque and Guigue (eds.), Le Dictionnaire Truffaut, p. 14.

22 Almendros, A Man with a Camera, p.12

23 Almendros, A Man with a Camera, p 87.. See similar comments made almost a decade earlier in

an English-language collection focusing on cinematographers: “[Truffaut] usually follows the

actors. [He] tries not to edit. If he can keep it all in one shot, he’s very happy”; Nestor Almendros,

“Nestor Almendros,” in Masters of Light: Conversations with Contemporary Cinematographers,

eds. Dennis Schaefer and Larry Salvato (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 10.

24 Jean Domarchi et al., “Hiroshima, notre amour,” Cahiers du Cinéma, 97 (1959), pp. 1-18;

translated in Jim Hillier (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma. Vol.1, 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New

Wave (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul/British Film Institute, 1985), p. 62.

25 Luc Moullet, “Sam Fuller sur les brisées de Marlowe,” Cahiers du Cinéma, 93 (1959), p. 14;

translated in Hillier (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma. Vol.1, 1950s, p. 148.

26 Jacques Rivette, “De l’abjection,” Cahiers du Cinéma, 120 (1961), pp. 54-55.

27 Le Berre, François Truffaut, pp. 184-189.

28 The term is used by Holmes and Ingram to describe the aerial shot in Jules et Jim, which, they

suggest, is “evocative of fierce elation.” Holmes and Ingram, François Truffaut, p. 70. As we shall

see, however, that elation is made more complex by irony.

29 Kundera, Testaments Betrayed, p. 86.

30 Alison Smith, “The Other Auteurs: Producers, Cinematographers and Scriptwriters,” in The

French Cinema Book, eds. Michael Temple and Michael Witt (London: British Film Institute,

2004), p. 201.

31 Tirez sur le pianiste, Jules et Jim, La Peau douce, La Mariée était en noir, and the short Antoine

et Colette.

32 L'Enfant sauvage, Domicile conjugal, Les Deux anglaises et le continent, L’Histoire d'Adèle H.,

L’Homme qui aimait les femmes, La Chambre verte, L’Amour en fuite, Le Dernier métro, Vivement

dimanche!

33 Une Belle Fille comme moi, La Nuit américaine, L’Argent de poche.

34 Baisers volés and La Sirène du Mississippi.

35 Translated in Holmes and Ingram, François Truffaut, p. 119 n3.

36 de Baecque and Guigue, Le Dictionnaire Truffaut, pp. 283-285.

37 There is a similar although slower pan in La Peau douce from the street to the flat where Pierre

Lachenay wishes to install his lover Nicole (1:36:57). My thanks to Sarah Leahy for reminding me

that Truffaut also favors the horizontal swish pan, albeit more functionally to indicate motion or

point of view. If we consider just his first three major films, in Les 400 Coups for example it links

the two cinemas visited by the boys (0:20:11), and is used in the rotor sequence to indicate circular

motion (0:20:21). In Tirez sur le pianiste it is used somewhat more conventionally to follow a car as

the thugs take Charlie and Léna away (0:26:37). In Jules et Jim, there is a series of swishes

purporting to be the men’s point of view as they search for the enigmatic statue on an Adriatic

island (0:8:26); a similar point-of-view shot occurs as the men turn their gaze onto Catherine’s car

towards the end of the film (1:29:41).

38 Holmes and Ingram, François Truffaut, p. 4.

39 Holmes and Ingram, François Truffaut, pp. 164-167.

40 Holmes and Ingram, François Truffaut, p. 170.

41 The film is Frank Lloyd’s The Shanghai Story (USA, 1954, released in France in 1956).

42 The film in this case is Claude Autant-Lara’s Le Comte de Monte Cristo (France, 1962).

43 Holmes and Ingram, François Truffaut, pp. 170-171.

44 Holmes and Ingram, François Truffaut, p. 171.

45 In La Nuit américaine the music is composed by Georges Delerue and is “half-Vivaldi, half-

Telemann,” according to Delerue’s official website. See Stéphane Lerouge, “The Cinema of

François Truffaut,” http://www.georges-delerue.com/eng/oeuvres/musique-ecran/truffaut/cinema-

truffaut.html (accessed 2 February 2011). In L’Enfant sauvage it is a Vivaldi mandolin concerto.

46 Collet makes a similar comment when discussing the crane shot in La Nuit américaine,

suggesting that the work involved in making a film “exalts us, in the strong and etymological sense

of the term, it lifts us up and makes us take off” (Collet, Le Cinéma de François Truffaut, p. 233).

47 Kundera, Testaments Betrayed, p. 85.

48 Dominique Auzel, François Truffaut: les mille et une nuits américaines (Paris: Veyrier, 1990), p.

86.

49 Holmes and Ingram, François Truffaut, p. 74.

50 Holmes and Ingram, François Truffaut, p. 120.

51 Phil Powrie, “Truffaut’s Vivement dimanche! (1983), or, How to take away with one hand what

you give with the other,” in Modern and Contemporary France, 43 (1990), pp. 37-46.

52 Holmes and Ingram, François Truffaut, p. 128.

53 Almendros, “Nestor Almendros,” in Masters of Light, p. 10.

54 Almendros, A Man with a Camera, p. 87.

55 Anne Gillain, “The Script of Delinquency: François Truffaut’s Les 400 Coups (1959),” in French

Film: Text and Contexts, eds. Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau (London: Routledge, 1990),

p. 189.

56 Le Berre, François Truffaut, p. 174.

57 Kundera, Testaments Betrayed, p. 85.

58 Ibid.

59 Holmes and Ingram, François Truffaut, p. 175.

60 Holmes and Ingram, François Truffaut, p. 176.

61 Le Berre, François Truffaut, p. 193; translated in Holmes and Ingram, François Truffaut, p. 58

n22.

62 I am grateful to Diana Holmes, Sarah Leahy, and T. Jefferson Kline for their comments on an

earlier version of this chapter.